III
That afternoon I again found myself in the Bischofsplatz, seated at one of the open-air tables of the café, when a man passed me, clad in the garb of a Franciscan monk. He had a pointed black beard, this monk, and a pair of flashing dark eyes; and, though he quickly drew his head into his cowl at our conjunction, I had no difficulty whatever in identifying him with my queerly-hirsute prison mate, Sebastian Roch.
“Dear me! he has become a monk. It must have been a swift conversion,” thought I, looking after him.
He marched straight across the Bischofsplatz and into the courtyard of the Marmorhof, where he was lost to view.
“The beggar! He is one of Conrad’s spies,” I concluded: and I searched my memory, to recall if I had said anything that might compromise me in the course of our conversation.
A few hours later I sat down to my dinner in the coffee-room of the Hôtel de Rome, and was about to fall to at the good things before me, when I was arrested in the act by a noise of hurrying feet on the pavement without, and a tumult of excited voices. Something clearly was “up”; and, not to miss it, I hurried to the street-door of the inn.
There I discovered mine host and hostess, supported by the entire personnel of their establishment, agape with astonishment, as a loquacious citizen poured news into their ears.
“Otto is dead,” said he. “He died at six o’clock. And Conrad has been assassinated. It was between four and five this afternoon. A Franciscan monk presented himself at the Marmorhof, and demanded an audience of the prince. The guard, of course, refused him admittance; but he was determined, and at last the Prince’s Chamberlain gave him a hearing. The upshot was he wrote a word or two upon a slip of paper, sealed it with wax, and begged that it might be delivered to his Highness forthwith, swearing that it contained information of the utmost importance to his welfare. The chamberlain conveyed his paper to the prince, who, directly he had read it, uttered a great oath, and ordered that the monk be ushered into his presence, and that they be left alone together. More than an hour passed. At a little after six arrived the news of the death of the old duke. An officer entered the prince’s chamber, to report it to him. There, if you please, he found his Highness stretched out dead upon the floor, with a knife in his heart. The monk had vanished. They could find no trace whatever of his whereabouts. Also had vanished the paper he had sent in to the prince. But, what the police regard as an important clue, he had left another paper, twisted round the handle of the dagger, whereon was scrawled, in a disguised hand: ‘In the country of the blind, it may be, the one-eyed men are kings, but Conrad only squinted!’ And now the grand point of it all is this,—shut up in an inner apartment of the Marmorhof, they have found the Hereditary Grand Duchess Mathilde, alive and well. Conrad has been keeping her a prisoner there these two weeks.”
The tidings thus delivered proved to be correct. “The Duke is dead! Long live the Duchess!” cried the populace.
It was like a dear old-fashioned blood-and-thunder opera, and I was almost behind the scenes. But oh, that hypocritical young fiddler-monk, Sebastian Roch! Would he make good his promise, after this, to look me up? The police were said to be prosecuting a diligent endeavour to look him up, but with, as yet, indifferent success.
Of course, upon the accession of the new ruler, the print shops of the town displayed her Highness’s portraits for sale—photographs and chromo-lithographs; you paid your money and you took your choice. These represented her as a slight young woman, with a delicate, interesting face, a somewhat sarcastic mouth, a great abundance of yellowish hair, and in striking contrast to this, a pair of brilliant dark eyes—on the whole, a picturesque and pleasing, if not conventionally a handsome, person. I could not for the life of me have explained it, but there was something in her face that annoyed me with a sense of having seen it before, though I was sure I never had. In the course of a fortnight, however, I did see her—caught a flying glimpse of her as she drove through the Marktstrasse in her victoria, attended by all manner of pomp and circumstance. She lay back upon her cushions, looking pale and interesting, but sadly bored, and responded with a languid smile to the hat-lifting of her subjects. I stared at her intently, and again I experienced that exasperating sensation of having seen her somewhere—where?—when?—in what circumstances?—before.